[tweetiepooh]

Fear is a bigger issue than the virus. It's fear that causes the problems and governments to take more control. People don't know real details and are being saturated with so much information it's hard to dig out the truth. And initial reports are often found to be less accurate later - healthy person dies -> didn't die from virus but from some other condition not know about at time.

And as always we want someone (else) to blame. If this really is a unique situation then responses will never be as good as maybe they should be. Even if it's not that unique getting large populations and organisations to change isn't trivial. But it's always someone fault. Even if we had a stock pile of ventilators it wouldn't be enough, someone somewhere would miss out. And I'd bet if we did have a stockpile they wouldn't have been maintained or they would be stored somewhere out of the way and can't transport them around fast enough. And why would we have stocked them up anyway? Can you imagine the headlines - NHS buys lots of ventilators just in case while patients are dying because they can't afford <insert drug/machine/treatment of choice here>!